Tommy Lee Jones

Family road trips are fraught with peril, from outrageous gas prices to sketchy rest stops to endless choruses of "Are we there yet?" But for the new comedy "Vacation," a sorta-reboot of 1983's "National Lampoon's Vacation," there are further bumps on the road to summer fun. Many movie critics are saying the film — written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Fracis Daley, starring Ed Helms — is raunchy but not trenchant, and it doesn't do much to update the "Vacation" series. The Times' Rebecca Keegan says the new "Vacation" is "the kind of movie that exists because greenlighting it is easier...

Before her three Oscars and 18 nominations, before her Emmys, medals, honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards, even before her first New York job as an actor, Meryl Streep spent a summer at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene...

Hollywood has spent some time in Connecticut over the years. Some big box-office hits have been filmed here. Some flops have, too. But what has Connecticut looked like to movie goers?
Some movies shot and set here take a jaundiced look at Connecticut....

The Academy Awards bring out the critic in everyone. It starts when the nominations are announced — "Whaddya mean, Ben Affleck wasn't nominated?" — and lasts long after Oscar night. That annual ritual takes place Sunday night and will be...

Bill Raymond, who has played Scrooge in Hartford Stage's "A Christmas Carol" in 12 of the last 14 annual runs, is featured in the upcoming Steven Spielberg film, "Lincoln," based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of...

The next spy film in the "Bourne" franchise has tracked down another cast member in Tommy Lee Jones, thus avoiding a search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in Hollywood.
Jones, best known...

"IT'S LIKE an old movie star. You're really creating an eyelid. It's also Greta Garbo makeup and Marlene Dietrich. That's why, with these kind of eyes, you can never do Botox. I did it once, and it was awful ... you look like some relative that...

In its setting and in its blunt, unfussy style, director, co-writer and star Tommy Lee Jones' "The Homesman" is a film out of time. It takes place in 1855, the year after the creation of the Nebraska Territory. Like Jones' previous theatrical...

I secretly always wanted to marry James Garner, and was foiled only by the fact that, as humorist Jean Kerr once wrote of her designs on George S. Kaufman, he was already married and I never met him.
I cannot imagine I was alone in this desire — in her...

CANNES, France — A comedy black enough to pass for India ink and, unlike so many grotesque comedies of modern manners, a film with just enough moral seriousness to make it stick, director David Cronenberg's “Maps to the Stars” defies such long odds it...

A number of high-profile 2014 awards hopefuls -- and an eclectic group of Hollywood stars -- will make their way to the Cannes Film Festival this year, joining the annual parade of global auteurs.
Bennett Miller’s fact-based wrestling tale...

In the three years since earning an Oscar nomination at age 14 for her film debut in Joel and Ethan Coen's "True Grit," Hailee Steinfeld has had barely a moment to catch her breath.
Last year, she tackled sci-fi ("Ender's Game) and...

Joaquin Phoenix refused to hug it out.
On an overcast November afternoon, in a $13-million Hollywood home with a skyline view stretching from downtown L.A. to the Palos Verdes peninsula, the notoriously press-averse actor was throwing a fit of pique —...

The 2013 Fall Movie Preview is a broad snapshot of films opening through Nov. 1. Release dates and other details, as compiled by Oliver Gettell, are subject to change.
SEPT. 6
36 Saints
Two New York City detectives hunt for a serial killer targeting 36...

The 2013 Fall Movie Preview is a broad snapshot of films opening through Nov. 1. Release dates and other details, as compiled by Oliver Gettell, are subject to change.
SEPT. 6
36 Saints
Two New York City detectives hunt for a serial killer targeting 36...

TOLUCA LAKE, Calif. — Looking trim in a black windbreaker over a gray crew neck sweatshirt, Steve Carell walked into the diner near the Warner Bros. lot just like a regular guy.
OK, most actors/celebrities walk into diners like regular folk; it’s not...

While it's true that there's only so much anyone can say about the Oscars, remember it can be said again and again. As a reader (and writer), I know by now that there are 10 abiding Oscar stories. Here they are, all in a single article:
The history
...

Hosting the 70th Golden Globes Sunday in Beverly Hills, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler proved it was possible to skewer their Hollywood colleagues without entirely alienating the crowd, as distinct from previous host Ricky Gervais.
Some 20 years after Fey...